There's a lot of irrelevants in the circus

Tag Archives: ZInke

Surprisingly, most people like the way this looks without oil derricks.

Last week, we revisited our old friend Bear Ears National Monument, which is Patient Zero for the GOP’s attempt to destroy the Antiquities Act. They don’t like the idea that land can be set aside just for public use, and not for the gain of private extraction and logging concerns. It’s one of the driving motivations of the contemporary GOP: the idea that the government is an alien, and that if something can be sold and converted into capital, it should. It’s why the Sagebrush Rebellion is one of the primary events in modern Republican history.

But, it turns out, just as people don’t like being kicked off their health care in order to finance tax cuts for the rich, people also like the idea that we should have unspoiled land for everyone to enjoy, not just for the few to profit off of. And they let Ryan Zinke’s Department of Interior know just that.

Most regulations are subject to public comment, which lets lawmakers know where people tend to stand on things. The attempt to eliminate or reduce 27 national monuments is no different. They received an incredible 1.3 million comments. And the results? It was close!

Charlottesville, Virginia-based Key-Log Economics used an innovative combination of crowdsourcing and machine learning, to comb through and analyze every one of the 1.3 million comments that were publicly available by the end of the official comment period. They found that 99.2 percent of comments oppose the possible elimination of the national monument designations or a reduction in their size and protected status.

(That the study was conducted in Charlottesville is just a coincidence, but does provide nice harmony about who wants to unite the common good and the forces arrayed against it.)

This is unsurprising! Most people are in favor of national monuments. But that’s one of the more insidious things about the Republican Party. They simply don’t care what most people want. And they have always used the manipulation of language (government overreach, private land, etc) to convince people to support things that they don’t actually support.

Any Western GOP politician, from Chaffetz to Zinke, has the speech down pat. The government wants to take over this land! They’ve taken it over without actually setting foot in it, a bunch of Washington bureaucrats! We want to return it to the people.

“The people”, here, are of course private concerns, who would shoot your ass for trespassing on their newly fenced-off land. But it sounds seductive, and is part and parcel of their overall philosophy that the government is the enemy of the people, and not the expression of our politics. It is contempt for democracy at the most basic level.

But we can push back. Who knows if these comments will do any good. Zinke is already showing himself to be a good Trumpista by wildly spinning the results.

Comments received were overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining existing monuments and demonstrated a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations. Opponents of monuments primarily supported rescinding or modifying the existing monuments to protect traditional multiple use, and those most concerned were often local residents associated with industries such as grazing, timber production, mining, hunting and fishing, and motorized recreation.

Well-orchestrated national campaigns. You can almost hear him whispering “Soros” and “fake news.” They contrast this with locals, though at least they are honest enough not to hide the mercenary motivations.

Again, this is part of the GOP and right-wing emotional strategy. A bunch of elites want one thing, and are ramming it down the throats of the hard-working locals, simple folk, really, who just want Uncle Sam off their back. Never mind that they aren’t going to be doing much huntin’ or fishin’ on Amalagamted Strip-Top Mining land. It’s freedom is what it is.

Don’t ignore either the way that the “national” campaign is sneered at, as if we as Americans shouldn’t have a say in our national heritage. It is the politics of division, as if a few people in one area have the full rights over who we are as a nation. It’s really a funny sort of patriotism. The million comments are dismissed because they came from people who care enough to comment, which is, I guess, a bad thing.

Will it work? I don’t know. I kind of feel like this is one of those things that could go either way. It is so unpopular that in a normal system they’d have to back off, but it is also under the radar enough that it can slip under the constant deafening storm of nonsense. But if the Antiquities Act goes, our national heritage is up for sale. It’s something to keep fighting.

They seriously had the nerve to announce this in front of Teddy Roosevelt, who created the Antiquities Act.

While the grim and still-strong lingerings of slavery and Jim Crow animate much of the modern conservative movement, it also drew enormous energy from the Sagebrush Rebellions of the 70s, when western ranchers and farmers started “standing up” to an overbearing federal government who didn’t want them to destroy the land. It was this, dovetailing with Buckley’s ideas of conservative politics, that allowed Ronald Reagan to win by saying “government is the problem”; something that Richard Nixon wouldn’t even think, much less say out loud. It’s not very well-known now, but its spirit is still around.

You see the spirit of Sagebrush in most Republican policies, which is that the there is no common good. It’s what makes the idea that corporations should be able to do whatever they want to whomever they want seem somehow principled, and even patriotic. But you also see it literally, in the actions of the Bundys, direct descendants of the movement. And you see it in the actions of the Trump administration, run by a man who never saw anything he didn’t want to sell.

We talked about how the administration was planning to sell off public lands to be developed or mined or logged or stripped clean (the cruel quintessence of the GOP), but now they are paving the way to make it actually happen. Adam Markham at the Union of Concerned Scientists has the details.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives the president of the United States the power to designate lands and waters for permanent protection. Almost every president since Teddy Roosevelt has used the Act to place extraordinary archaeological, historic and natural sites under protection and out of reach of commercial exploitation.

Many sites originally designated as national monuments were later upgraded by Congress to become national parks, including Bryce Canyon, Saguaro and Death Valley. In many cases in the past, the Antiquities Act allowed presidents to protect vital natural and cultural resources when congressional leaders, often compromised by their ties to special interests representing coal, oil, timber and mining industries, were reluctant or unwilling to act.

A new Executive Order signed by President Trump on April 26th, 2017 puts this important regulatory tool for conservation and historic preservation at risk. The clear intention of the Executive Order is to lay the groundwork for shrinking national monuments or rescinding their designation entirely, in order to open currently protected public lands for untrammeled growth in coal, oil and minerals extraction.

Ryan Zinke, who this blog once made the mistake of calling “maybe not terrible“, is all in on this. Markham slaps him down.

Secretary Zinke himself was quoted ridiculing “people in D.C. who have never been to an area, never grazed the land, fished the river, driven the trails, or looked locals in the eye, who are making the decisions and they have zero accountability to the impacted communities.”

But, in fact, national monument designations almost always derive from a local grassroots demand for greater protections, and usually only come after lengthy periods of community engagement and consultations.

Because here’s the thing. In Zinke’s list, “graz(ing) the land” is the only thing that people will still be able to do. Maybe fish the rivers, if you buy commercial fishing rights. People can walk or drive the trails and visit the areas because they are protected. What do you think–if a mining company buys rights to land in Bear Ears they’re going to just let you waltz in?

Or course not. If you let rich ranchers like the Bundys take over more land, it is, by definition, no longer the people’s land. Go ahead. Walk onto Bundy property. They aren’t going to greet you with a Woodie Guthrie song.

Public designations are how we protect these lands for everyone. It’s how we protect our heritage. It’s a way of saying that not everything can or should be parceled off, exploited, turned into capital, and sold to benefit the very few. Because of that, it is anethema to the modern Republican Party. That this move is an immediate screw you to natives is just a bonus). Bear Ears didn’t

I guarantee you that Trump has never heard of Sagebrush, and I doubt he has any strong ideological reasons for selling off the land, unless he gets a taste. But he hates things that Obama did, and his animating principle has always been “I got mine, so screw you.” In that, as in so many things, he is the perfect Republican. He is ready to sell, and our national sense of unity and a common good is paying the price.